Full Download and Read PDF Free

Four thousand years ago bands of hunter-gatherers lived in and traveled through the challenging terrain of what is now southwest Texas and northern Mexico. Today travelers to that land can view large art panels they left behind on the rock walls of Rattlesnake Canyon, White Shaman Cave, Panther Cave, Mystic Shelter, and Cedar Springs. Messages from a distant past, they are now interpreted for modern readers by artist-archaeologist Carolyn Boyd. It has been thought that the meaning of this ancient art was lost with the artists who produced it. However, thanks to research breakthroughs, these elaborate rock paintings are again communicating a narrative that was inaccessible to humanity for millennia. In the gateway serpents, antlered shamans, and human-animal–cross forms pictured in these ancient murals, Boyd sees a way that ancient hunter-gatherer artists could express their belief systems, provide a mechanism for social and environmental adaptation, and act as agents in the social, economic, and ideological affairs of the community. She offers detailed information gleaned from the art regarding the nature of the lower Pecos cosmos, ritual practices involving the use of sacramental and medicinal plants, and hunter-gatherer lifeways. Now, combining the tools of the ethnologist with the aesthetic sensibilities of an artist, Boyd demonstrates that prehistoric art is not beyond explanation. Images from the past contain a vast corpus of data—accessible through proven, scientific methods—that can enrich our understanding of human life in prehistory and, at the same time, expand our appreciation for the work of art in the present and the future.

"The remnants of prehistoric Lower Pecos people reveal lifeways unlike those anywhere in the world. The people who inhabited what is now Texas left artifacts that provide information about 12,000 years of existence, the last 7,000 of which are still astoundingly evident. Includes maps, charts, tables, photographs, and drawings"--Provided by publisher.

Useful for academic and recreational archaeologists alike, this book identifies and describes over 200 projectile points and stone tools used by prehistoric Native American Indians in Texas. This third edition boasts twice as many illustrations—all drawn from actual specimens—and still includes charts, geographic distribution maps and reliable age-dating information. The authors also demonstrate how factors such as environment, locale and type of artifact combine to produce a portrait of theses ancient cultures.

The plaza has been a defining feature of Mexican urban architecture and culture for at least 4,000 years. Ancient Mesoamericans conducted most of their communal life in outdoor public spaces, and today the plaza is still the public living room in every Mexican neighborhood, town, and city—the place where friends meet, news is shared, and personal and communal rituals and celebrations happen. The site of a community's most important architecture—church, government buildings, and marketplace—the plaza is both sacred and secular space and thus the very heart of the community. This extensively illustrated book traces the evolution of the Mexican plaza from Mesoamerican sacred space to modern public gathering place. The authors led teams of volunteers who measured and documented nearly one hundred traditional Mexican town centers. The resulting plans reveal the layers of Mesoamerican and European history that underlie the contemporary plaza. The authors describe how Mesoamericans designed their ceremonial centers as embodiments of creation myths—the plaza as the primordial sea from which the earth emerged. They discuss how Europeans, even though they sought to eradicate native culture, actually preserved it as they overlaid the Mesoamerican sacred plaza with the Renaissance urban concept of an orthogonal grid with a central open space. The authors also show how the plaza's historic, architectural, social, and economic qualities can contribute to mainstream urban design and architecture today.

Paul G. Bahn provides a richly illustrated overview of prehistoric rock art and cave art from around the world. Summarizing the recent advances in our understanding of this extraordinary visual record, he discusses new discoveries, new approaches to recording and interpretation, and current problems in conservation. Bahn focuses in particular on current issues in the interpretation of rock art, notably the 'shamanic' interpretation that has been influential in recent years and that he refutes. This book is based on the Rhind Lectures that the author delivered for the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 2006.

The contributors to this volume discuss a series of these technical, methodological and substantive issues in the analysis of hunter-gatherer rock art. Principally emphasizing North America, the contributions provide summaries of advances in the dating of pictographs and petroglyphs, and interpretations of the art using ethnohistorical, iconographic, stratigraphic, and compartative data, with approaches informed by symbolic, semiotic, and gender studies.